The cost of building seawalls worldwide will fall well below the cost of inaction, the study found. If the walls aren’t built, about 5 percent of the world’s population will face annual floods that will consume 10 percent of the global economy.

“The researchers think that the worst results are unlikely to happen, because people won't tolerate it,” Scientific American writes. “Instead, the group of 10 European academics predicts that the difficult decision to build expensive dike systems will grow easier in the future as the price of floods increase.”

Jochen Hinkel, a senior researcher at the Global Climate Forum and a co-author of the paper, told Scientific American that humans will have little choice but to build walls because they’ll be faced with recurring tragedies along the scale of “Superstorm Sandy.”

"Humans will do something,” he said. “We're talking about massive damages if we didn't do anything."

Even building walls and dikes worldwide won’t negate the economic impact of rising seas, the researchers found, though it likely would limit the annual impact to about $80 billion.